Upphovsrätt på Internet - en analys av tjänsteleverantörers medverkansansvar

Sammanfattning: In recent years, copyright law has been given much attention since the digital development and the emergence of the Internet made it possible to quickly storage and transfer large amounts of audio, images and text without loss of quality. The transfer is often illegal and there is a widespread copyright infringement going on in the Internet environment. In these infringements there are three main participants involved; the Internet service provider, the provider of the website and the user of the website. There is no doubt that a provider of a website is responsible for the content on his website. This follows from the law regarding electronic bulletin boards which regulate some degree of supervision of the website and that the subjects which violate the law must be removed. There is also no doubt that a service provider can be liable for contributory copyright infringement and imposed penalties and be required to pay a civil compensation for their contribution. This is regulated in the Criminal Code (BrB) chapter 23, Copyright Act (URL) 53 § and in the Copyright Act Chapter 9 regarding liability and general tort law principles of compensation for participation and contribution. Of the general debate to judge, the responsibility for service providers seem to be not very clear. To what extent and in which situations are there a liability for contributory infringements? As an example, the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, at least officially, had a position where they believed that they were not considered to be guilty of infringement. The Pirate Bay thought that the responsibility lay on the individual user. One of the reasons why there are these legal uncertainties, in my opinion, depends on services that are of a dual-use technology, and the nature of those, in which there is both a legal and an illegal use. A short section of the paper highlights the problem of Dual-Use Technologies. In the Swedish law regarding contribution to infringements there are no limitations that also include the possibility of contributing to contributing to an infringement. This should involve, at least theoretically, that an Internet Service Provider that provides services to a website could be liable for infringement that occurs on that specific website. Something that seems more realistic regarding Internet Service Providers and liability, which has been up for a trial, is the prohibition tied with a penalty which is regulated in the Copyright Act 53b §. The prohibition does not require that either the subjective conditions or the damage need to be proved for a particular infringement to be prohibited at the discretion of the court. In the prohibition only the objective conditions are necessary. This means that in a digital environment with many different participators even Internet Service Providers might be considered a part of a copyright infringement. This paper aims to investigate the service provider's responsibility for 1 contribution to copyright infringement on the Internet. The concept of the service is broad and includes most of the participants on the Internet. The service providers that are selected are those who run web sites with an interactive service where users can upload their own material and Internet Service Providers. Regarding Internet service providers the focus lies on the objective part of the contributory infringement. The results of this work shows that the responsibility the service providers have for copyright infringement that occurs on their websites in the Swedish law is far reaching. Anyone who runs a web site is contributing, if there is infringing material on the site, if the service provider is aware of this and no action by the service provider is implemented to counter the interference. This may then lead to a criminal penalty and / or a civil compensation. The crucial point is what purpose the site has, whether the provider is aware of the infringement and what is used to counter the infringement. If no action is being taken it is a risk that the contributory act will be heard as a failure. For an Internet service provider to be held responsible for contributory actions to infringements that occur on websites the Internet service provider, in my opinion, need to have a connection to the provider of the website more then just providing the Internet access. This could be, for example, agreements of server storage capacity or the like. For copyright law to function more smooth there is a discharge that may apply to service providers which are regulated in e-commerce law.(e-handelslagen) The discharge has an important function particularly for services with a legal order. The paper aims to investigate this discharge. In assessing whether there is a contributory copyright infringement or not, an overall assessment should be appropriate because of the variety of factors that may play a role, both objective and subjective.